Fax technology has been in use now for several decades and allows paper documents to be scanned, digitized, and transported via analog telephone connections using the G3 fax protocols and modern technology. As the Internet grew to become ubiquitous, Internet based fax server technology was introduced in order to allow faxes to be received and forwarded to recipients via email.
Internet fax services, generically known as “efax” services, add many benefits beyond standard analog fax machines. Using these services, people can fax documents to a recipient's fixed published fax telephone number, but the fax can be received and printed out from any location in the world that provides Internet access. Further, such efax transmissions received over a broadband Internet connection do not tie up a telephone line during the reception of the fax, although the transmitting fax still ties up a telephone line and experiences the per-page telephonic transmission delay. Yet further, as long as the efax user has access to a scanner, efax services eliminate the need for a fax machine, provide superior image quality, and provide a host of other user/worker productivity/efficiency advantages. For example, with efax services, the user/worker need not worry about replacing the fax machine ink cartridge, reloading a document feeder tray, fax machine maintenance and repair, downtime due to fax machine malfunction, clearing paper jams, etc. In general, efax technology provides a faster, cheaper, superior, and more efficient way to create and transmit documents throughout the entire world, as compared to using conventional fax machines.
While efax technology is typically used to receive faxes (inbound technology, also known as “fax-to-email”), efax technology can also be used to send faxes (outbound technology, also known as “email-to-fax”). With email-to-fax technology, a subscriber typically sends an email with a scanned image file attachment (e.g., .tif or .pdf), to a subscriber's outbound fax-to-email address. When the email is received at this address, the server inspects the subject field for a telephone number and causes an outbound telephone call to be made to a fax machine, and the fax is transmitted via standard G3 fax signals to a recipient fax machine across the telephone network. The email-to-fax server system may be distributed and route the fax as an email to a local point of presence (POP) and make a local outbound fax call to minimize telephone toll charges.
A somewhat hybrid offshoot of the above technologies is called Emate technology. With Emate technology, special fax machines are used that allow a user to enter an email address into a fax machine, make a telephone call to a fax-to-email server, and transmit the fax using standard G3 type analog fax signals. A fax-to-email type server then receives the fax call, extracts the email address therefrom, converts the fax to an image file format (like .tif or .pdf), attaches the image file to an email, and sends the resultant efax to the specified recipient email address. Among other reasons, because the Emate solution requires a special type of fax machine, and further, still requires a fax-to-email server, this technology has not been widely adopted. Instead, fax-to-email services prevail in the marketplace, and users interested in receiving faxes as emails subscribe to such services, e.g., those offered by j2 Global Communications, Inc.
Throughout this application, it should be noted that an “image file” generally refers to a file in an image file format, such as a .pdf file or a .tif file. Often the image file is a bit mapped file (.bmp file). If OCR (optical character recognition) is used, the image file can be stored with less bits than a bit-mapped image, and can also be made searchable and computer manipulable.
Another presently available technology is a multifunction fax machine. A multifunction fax machine can be used as an ordinary fax machine to send fax messages using the G3 fax protocol across standard telephone lines. Similarly, the multifunction fax machine can be used as a printer, and also as a scanner. Typically, the resolution for copies is not as good as a standard copy machine, but this is an implementation issue. Multifunction fax machines find use mainly in small office/home office (SOHO) environments because there is typically limited space to house separate copy machines, printers and fax machines.
While these various hybrid Internet fax solutions have extended the life of fax technology, it has become apparent to the present inventors that fax technology is, in and of itself, dated and cumbersome. What is needed is a universal network-based scanning technology that can eliminate the need for fax machines altogether, enabling a new generation of enhanced document creation, delivery and management systems.
Modern computer technology offers many ways to attach electronic documents of all kinds to emails and to globally transmit them to end-user email accounts, and/or using FTP or other protocols. However, current computer technology is lacking in certain ways, and this void is still being filled by fax technology. Fax technology is still the accepted way of remotely and electronically executing legally binding documents like contracts, agreements and purchase orders. Using existing technology, scanners can be used to scan documents, and the scanned document can be attached to en email and sent from a computer to a destination email address. However, because computer technology can readily be used to alter documents in electronic form and is susceptible to hacking and spoofing, such documents are not as well trusted as documents faxed by legacy analog fax machines.
A recent addition to the field is a scanner system (or combined scanner system with any combination of the following extra functions: copier/printer/fax) where a user can drop a document into a paper feeder, enter a destination email address, and transmit the scanned document to the destination email address. This new functionality is called “scan-to-email.” While such functionality is a step in the right direction, it is lacking in many ways. First of all, the scanner often creates large bitmap files. Bitmap files are often desired for electronically transmitted legal documents because they are not as readily computer manipulable as text based documents and therefore are perceived as being more secure.
When sending bitmapped images, the files rapidly become too large to be processed by an email server, so that, for example, a sender sending twenty or so color pages from a magazine, might have to break the scan job into fifteen separate email transmissions. If a large contract needs to be executed, even though it is in black and white, it would not be acceptable to break it into many pieces to make it fit through email. Because time is so expensive, a technology that requires both a sending operator and a recipient to wait long times for uploads and downloads may in some ways be worse than fax. At least with fax, the recipient can be doing something else while the fax comes in, assuming no paper jams and/or other fax machine malfunction and/or communication link failure occurs during the transmission.
Other important features are also missing from modern scanners that can be attached to networks and which have a scan-to-email capability. While user authentication is used to allow a user to enter an email account and other types of user accounts, no user authentication techniques have been combined with the scanner to positively identify a user and link the positively-identified user with a particular scanned document. There is a long-felt need for an improved computerized system for transmitting legally binding documents via electronic means other than costly and cumbersome fax technology, and this need is as yet unfilled, even by the current generation scan-to-email technology. Rather, legacy fax machines which are slow, costly, and of relatively poor image quality are still used to transmit documents. Fax machines allow a recipient to know where the fax came from (caller ID log), and also allow the sender to dial a telephone number, hear it ring, hear it pick up, hear the machines handshake, and see a transmission report message that indicates that all the pages were sent properly. The recipient exercises physical control over a hard copy document sent by analog fax means that went straight from paper to telephone signals and now to his/her fax paper output, so the user is more or less sure the fax was not altered electronically. Hence conventional analog fax transmissions are typically more trusted than scanned email attachments and, therefore, fax transmissions are still required by most companies to execute agreements, to send or receive purchase orders or purchase order modifications, and other documents which have evidentiary value and/or require a high level of document integrity.
For these reasons, in current practice, fax machines are often used to execute legal documents such as contracts. When the fax is received, the faxed signature is accepted as legally binding. However, in reality, this provides only a light form of security. For example, a signature could be taken from a first contract and pasted onto a second contract, copied, and then faxed. By simply cutting, pasting, and copying with a copy machine, a document can be easily forged and faxed. With the older analog fax technology, nobody really knows who actually created and/or faxed the document being transmitted. Also a forger can easily enter a false sending-fax telephone number to be printed on each received fax page. That is, while analog fax technology is accepted as legally binding, the inventors recognize that this is out of historical necessity for lack of a better technology, not for technical reasons.
In addition to the above-described drawbacks and shortcomings of current scan-to-email technology, such as the lack of sender authentication and the inefficiencies of large bitmap files, email is not an ideal medium for important business transactions because a user is never really sure the email ever got to its destination. Too many times a large attachment is sent and some email server along the way simply deletes it and never sends it on to its intended destination. Therefore no one can ever sure an email will get through to its intended destination, especially if there is a big file attachment. Nobody wants to send a fifty page contract and have no idea whether it was received without having to call the recipient and ask. Also, large documents often experience long email delays, so that even calling and asking for confirmation of receipt is not always effective.
Consider trying to file an IDS with the USPTO with 150 pages of references using scan-to-email technology as opposed to fax technology. With fax technology, this process would be so slow and onerous that most people would just send it though the mail. However if someone did spend the time to fax it, at least they would know, if there were no paper jams and/or communications glitches along the way that made them start over, that all the pages were received by the USPTO and would be filed. However, if scan-to-email technology were used and a USPTO email address were supplied to accept incoming documents, the sender would have no way to be sure the USPTO ever received the large email attachment. Although an auto-reply email function can be used to indicate receipt of the email message, there is presently no mechanism for the email recipient to automatically confirm receipt of any email attachment. Again, the practitioner would rather use regular mail than scan-to-email for this reason. Hence, there are significant improvements that need to be made before a technology like scan-to-email can receive widespread acceptance and ultimately become a global standard for document creation and delivery to replace fax technology in the marketplace.
What is missing in the art is a technology that can be used to securely scan documents and seamlessly transmit resulting image files to any location across the globe without the need to convert them to analog fax signals and to transmit them across the public switched telephone network (PSTN). It would be advantageous to be able to supply such functionality without the need to employ expensive fax server systems that use special purpose boards to receive fax signals via telephone lines and to convert the fax signals to image format files or FoIP (fax-over-IP) signals. It would be advantageous to be able to securely send laser quality documents to any point in the world. It would be advantageous to have a technology to securely execute documents to enter into legal contracts remotely. It would also be advantageous to have a technology which would enable the creation of a remotely transmittable electronic document having evidentiary integrity from a hard copy input document, preferably without the need for specialized infrastructure and/or specialized services for performing e-mail-to-fax and/or fax-to-e-mail conversions remotely of the point of creation of the transmittable document. It would be further advantageous to have a new technology that does not merely convert lower quality fax transmissions to image files and transmit them as attachments to emails, but rather starts from the ground up to provide a fully integrated global document creation and delivery system that uses existing Internet and/or other communications network transport protocols and new inventive application programs and protocols to integrate document creation and delivery with modern computer technology. It would be desirable to vastly improve upon the newly introduced scan-to-email technology to make it more convenient to use by providing improved user interfaces, improved network transmission methodology, confirmation of receipt by the recipient, and integrated document authentication, sender authentication, and security functions. It would be yet further advantageous to implement such a new technology in a network-sharable device, such as a “network scanner”.
In sum, there presently exists in the art a need for an electronic document creation and delivery method which overcomes or minimizes the drawbacks and shortcomings of the presently available technology, and which provides some or all of the advantageous features described above which are presently missing from the art. The present invention addresses this need in the art.